John McCain’s War

Apparently Senator John McCain’s senility and dementia has reached a new level. He wandered into Syria over the weekend thinking it was Wal-Mart and he was there to buy pleated Dockers and plaid button up shirts. Yes, sadly, senility has finally set in for ol’ John Boy. He’s lost control of his faculties, clearly. No one would just sneak into a country being ripped apart by a bloody sectarian civil war that neither side really looks like the ones we want to partner with for some Memorial Day Weekend barbecue. Well, unless you’re just suffering from some kind of memory loss brought on by being completely and utterly senile. Otherwise it would almost look as if the old buzzard was trying to get America involved in a war all on his own.

Quelle Reagan.

Is this what all Republicans do in their Golden Years…fund little illegal wars? Maybe it’s like Viagra to them and they can’t get off unless they know they’re funneling armaments to shady people that will turn around use their weapons and training on us. McCain’s hawkishness over the years has been rather vulgar and increasingly embarrassing to the country at large. Remember, he’s the one who joked about bombing Iran during the 2008 presidential campaign, he’s the guy who wants us in Iraq and Afghanistan forever, and he still goes on record everywhere he can — most notably during Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearing – as defending not only the legality and necessity of the Iraq War, but the success of it too. He’s one of a handful of people outside of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who actually think the Iraq War wasn’t and will remain the worst foreign policy decision of our lifetimes. McCain has a hard-on for war for like very few we’ve ever seen.

It’s odd though, isn’t it? The man spent so much time in a tiger cage in Vietnam that one would assume he’d never want to subject any other young man or woman to that kind of Hell. Though you could give him at least some credit for being unlike Senators Kelly Ayotte or Lindsey Graham. Those two haven’t seen combat and yet they are always right there alongside McCain huffing and puffing and demanding to know why we aren’t traipsing into Syria or Iran, dicks in hand, ready to deliver high-caliber freedom and cluster Democracy bombs from here to eternity. Ironic since the last film McCain saw in a theater was “From Here to Eternity,” but I digress.

There’s a lot about President Obama that Republicans despise. It doesn’t just start and end with the fact that he’s a Democrat in the White House. No, I’m not referring to his skin tone, though to be sure there are plenty who see that as being his primary impeachable offense. They don’t like his proven record of steady if not sluggish economic recovery — made all the more sluggish thanks to their obstruction. They don’t like that his signature piece of legislation has proven pretty much bulletproof at this point, passing Constitutional muster with the Supreme Court last year.

What they really, really don’t like about Obama though is the fact that he has helped wrest control of the “Strong on National Defense” card away from them after decades. After ten years of Republican Warfare, the country has sort of figured out that the people who gain the most from those wars aren’t the average citizens of either the U.S. or whatever country we’re “liberating.” The ones who profit most are the contractors; the DOD Welfare Queens that siphon billions away from the government teat every year and by and large Americans don’t want the Bush Doctrine anymore. That infuriates the right, hence the endless hand wringing over Benghazi despite there being far more embassy attacks and far more lives lost under George W. Bush’s reign than in Obama’s. They desperately need to get the foreign policy narrative back under their control, but much like their domestic policies, their foreign policies are just unpopular and have been widely proven to be more damaging to our relationships abroad than they’re worth.

Then Obama goes and tells the world we’ve killed four Americans with drones since 2009, and that more importantly we don’t want to do that anymore, at least not the way it’s been getting done up to this point. The counter-terrorism speech that Obama delivered last week was probably the straw the broke the camel’s back for McCain on Syria. The old fool has been making the Sunday talk show circuit for what feels like a decade now, insisting that Obama’s not doing enough, that we need to arm the rebels and help them oust their horrible leader. He’s been spoiling for a fight in Syria for some time now, and when he heard President Obama say that it’s time to stop treating the War on Terror like this never-ending, nebulous hole we dump money, human lives and good international standing down into. And McCain had to realize that meant we may not even get directly involved in that country’s civil war, which likely sent him packing.

I’d be curious to think what Senator McCain would think of Senator Ted Cruz doing what he did. The downright hubris it takes to sneak into a war torn country that the international community has been grappling with a good and solid response to for some time and meet with an opposition force that we don’t know if we can fully trust yet is pretty galling if you ask me. McCain clearly has no respect for either President Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry, whose jobs actually are to go into hostile situations and try to help mitigate them. McCain’s overstep here isn’t criminal, it’s just stupid, and so nakedly transparent. McCain loves the way we did business in the Reagan and Bush(es) Era. He loves little illegal wars. He must, otherwise he’d have been more than content to let the chips fall a little more.

No one likes hearing about the atrocities taking place in Syria right now. No one likes to think of people being exposed to nerve gasses and being attacked by their own army. However, the fact remains that we just don’t have enough facts about the facts. Choosing a side in this war is like choosing between a stick in the eye now and a stick in the eye years from now. These are the exact kinds of situations that warrant a new kind of approach. These are the exact tough international dilemmas that require a multinational approach, and one where the U.S. doesn’t take the lead. With unemployment and poverty being what it is in this country, despite the ability of the president to get our economy back on solid footing, this is no time to fire up the war machines. We have far too much to fix here at home to get into a risky agreement with people we cannot fully trust.

McCain should be ashamed of himself. He’s acting like a blood-thirsty war baron. I have no clue if he holds any stock in defense contracting companies, but his behavior is making it seem as if he has ulterior motives. Perhaps those ulterior motives are just that he loves war so much he can’t stand it unless the United States is starting a war a year, I don’t know. Clearly though, he’s a danger to society at this point. His sole focus has been to drag us into war, and there can’t be any doubt now that had Americans not done the wise thing and elected McCain back in 2008, we’d most certainly still be mired in the Great Recession and we’d have gotten involved in Syria too. Maybe McCain’s Syrian vacation should be a huge sigh of relief for us. He can’t make any official deals with either side in Syria, so all he’s done is expose to us all once more just what a poison to peace he really is.

Maybe he thinks if he is a two-time prisoner of war he could get elected President.